How to Use Quizzes to Score and Qualify Your Leads

It’s not enough just to generate new leads, is it? Sales doesn’t want just any lead. They want the good leads. The Glengarry leads, if you will. They are, after all, gold.

This means you’ve got to track and score interactions to ensure they’re qualified to go to sales.

One of the most powerful ways to do that is with interactive content. And quizzes, believe it or not, are one of the best forms of interactive content for qualifying leads.

I spent about twenty minutes on the phone with Gary Spirer, Founder/CEO of Dilogr, an interactive multi-media content engagement, feedback, and analytics platform. Dilogr specializes in quiz marketing, so it made sense to get Gary’s take on how quizzes can help small businesses score their leads.

Quizzes work for lead scoring because they’re interactive

Spirer loves the idea that quizzes are much more than just fun little time wasters. They are powerful tools that help you understand your customers. And they help your customers understand themselves.

When you use a platform like DilogR in collaboration with marketing automation and CRM, like Infusionsoft, you can use quizzes to engage the audience, provide targeted offers and timely follow up, and then analyze how you did. In fact, DilogR is finding that customers who use quiz marketing are getting 50-80 percent conversion on quizzes.

Quizzes help people understand themselves (which is the perfect setup for qualifying your leads)

The mastermind of BuzzFeed’s quizzes, Summer Anne Burton, stated that people don’t want a scientific answer from the quizzes they take. They approach quizzes a little like they do astrology. She meant that people understand that no quiz is perfect, but people are looking for some nugget of useful analysis that can help them understand themselves or make a decision.

Translation: You can help your customer understand their readiness to buy.

Not only do their answers give you insight into the lead, but the lead is prepped to understand more about themselves, their pain, and the solution they are looking for. “This means that you don’t have to sell to them,” Gary tells me, “Because they sell themselves.”

In a quiz, users readily provide input about their own situation in a way that can be nearly impossible to collect in any other way. Whether it’s their favorite color, the value of their home, or how much they’d like to spend on their next vacation.

Check out the sample quiz below from Melissa Jill Photography. This quiz serves two purposes: First, the assessment helps other photographers decide whether or not they’re ready to hire associate photographers to grow their business. Second, it collects all the details needed to qualify the leads for Melissa Jill’s coaching services. It’s a win-win.

The quiz title is a key step in scoring

You score leads to understand their level of interest in buying, right? People take quizzes because of the promise in the title, which means a click reveals interest relative to the title. Let’s say you provide insulation and weatherizing solutions to homeowners, and you consider a quiz entitled, “Is your home actually winterized?” Anyone who takes this quiz not only wants to know whether or not they’re up to par but is also curious to know what they may have missed.

Both to increase engagement, and to understand intent, the title should be topic-dense and relevant. Titles that feel like click bait don’t work (neither for engagement nor for helping you score real interest). The questions and the final outcome always need to line up with the promise of the title.

The questions are not just a means to an end

The questions on a good survey should reveal something to the user along the way. They should be personal. DilogR has a great post on how to create engaging quizzes, and what to consider when building your questions.

The best quizzes are mindful of the user’s time. Too short, and your results won’t have enough meat to add up to a result that feels credible. Too long, and you run the risk of losing engagement. The average survey has 6-10 questions, and Spirer assures me that this is the right target length.

From a lead scoring standpoint, this is where you dig into what you need to know to determine your lead’s quality. If it’s relevant, you can find out a lot about your leads, like who they are, what they’re interested in, and how much they feel their pain.

Sticking to our home weatherization company example, the questions you ask (like, “When was the last time you had insulation blown in your attic?”) reveal how ready your lead is for your services. Track that answer along with the contact information and you have criteria for scoring this lead.

Want to know the most powerful result from a quiz? Customized reports. You just gathered some enormously useful data from your lead, so why not offer them a report that targets their result?

Our example weatherization survey could have one result which is, “Looks like you’re really on top of your home’s weatherization.” A great CTA to go along with that result would be, “Download our ebook on how to optimize your energy savings over the next 5 years.” These users are primed for a nurture email campaign to keep them aware of the need to keep their home up to date on insulation in order to be most cost effective in their energy costs.

For users who get the result, “Ouch, looks like you really need to weatherize your home.” A great CTA would be, “Connect with an expert on how you can get a jump on the weather now.” This lead would go straight to sales.

Use quizzes to refine your understanding of your buyer personas

Many times, businesses assume they understand the customers they want to attract. But because quizzes are interactive, the results you get from your quizzes can tell you a lot about who’s attracted to your content, what they need, and what they really need as a solution.

Pay attention to the results. Use the knowledge you gain to refine your approach. It may even lead you to tweak your funnel.

Before you create a quiz, ask yourself these three questions:

Spirer let me in on the three main questions he asks everyone who asks him for advice on how to set up a quiz.

What’s the outcome?

What do you want to achieve from the quiz? Are you looking for more leads? Do you want to qualify leads you already have? Maybe you just want to build your brand. Before you start working on your quiz, you need to know what it will do for you.

Who’s the audience?

Of course, your target audience is pivotal to your success on the quiz. You can’t miss on this one. The “What Michael Jackson song am I?” quiz won’t work with every audience. But fun pop culture references can actually factor into professional quizzes, if done right. It begins with understanding your audience and knowing what they like.

Where does this quiz fit in your funnel?

Your audience can respond to a quiz at any stage in the funnel and offer you great insight into their journey. Don’t assume that a quiz automatically means top of the funnel, interest-level stuff. Quizzes are powerful at any stage of the funnel. In fact, they offer you some of the best value when you target middle and bottom of the funnel.

There are two basic kinds of quizzes you can use, and the type of quiz matters to your funnel:

Personality Quizzes: These tend to be fun, shareable quizzes, like the ones BuzzFeed is famous for. “What Game of Thrones Character are You Really?” These work great for top of the funnel, and can be a great introduction to the problem they’re facing.

You can kick personality quizzes up a notch to get deeper into your personas. When you help your audience understand who they are as a buyer. These can be very valuable in the middle of the funnel and for refining your own buyer personas.

Scored Quizzes: Scored quizzes don’t necessarily mean that the result is a numbered score. Rather, it means that each question is weighted, and the combination of answers helps provide the user with a valuable assessment.

Scored quizzes can serve as top of the funnel, with quizzes like, “How well do you know the Beatles?” Or they can be deep, powerful assessments that work well for middle or even bottom of the funnel, like “How prepared are you for CRM implementation?”

Here’s where it gets interesting: The majority of times, quizzes are used as early-stage, top of the funnel, content. But Spirer notes that the best quizzes can be used for the middle of the funnel, and even bottom of the funnel, helping your customers make meaningful decisions toward buying.

Get started with quizzes now!

If you haven’t used quizzes yet as part of your content marketing strategy, now’s the time to start. They are one of the most effective ways to interact with customers on their journey to purchasing (from you).

Quizzes are a great catalyst for moving leads through your funnel, but, as Spirer points out, they can even be a funnel on their own. Think back to the Melissa Jill Photography example (seriously, if you didn’t take her quiz above, then go back and do it. It’s a great example). She has a piece of content that’s primed to filter out qualified leads that can go straight to sales because she knows all the critical details she needs to know in order to reach out to them. On top of that, she walks away with their contact information, so she can start nurturing leads that aren’t quite ready just yet with email campaigns.

When you combine a robust interactive marketing platform like DilogR with a powerful CRM and marketing automation, like Infusionsoft (as Melissa Jill has done), you are set up to score leads and funnel the best ones, the Glengarry ones, over to sales. A good quiz can make you a hero to you customers and a hero to sales. It gives new meaning to “win-win.”

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